Facebook responsible for a fifth of divorces

Emma Woollacott, 22nd December 2009

Infidelity, fatherless children, poverty - it's all Facebook's fault.

Research carried out by a UK online divorce service indicates that the social networking site is really bad for your marriage.Divorce-Online scanned its divorce petition database for the use of the word 'Facebook' - and found no fewer than 989 instances of the word in the 5,000 divorce petitions sampled.

This means that just under a fifth of all the petitions filed through the company had references to Facebook within the text of the divorce petition itself, implying that it was a pretty major factor in the split.

Managing Director Mark Keenan said "I had heard from my staff that there were a lot of people saying they had found out things about their partners on Facebook, and I decided to see how prevalent it was.

"I was really surprised to see 20 percent of all the petitions containing references to Facebook. The most common reason seemed to be people having inappropriate sexual chats with people they were not supposed to."